6:53 p.m.
Hi all,
Now that we are tightening up all our loose ends and trying to make this
a really solid 1.0 release, I was wondering what we want to do with
BusyBox. This is by far the worst package we ship in the entire distro:
packages$ find . -name '*.patch' | cut -d'/' -f3 | sort | uniq -c
[ ... ]
12 binutils
12 openssl
17 firefox-esr
17 qemu
33 busybox
The way I see it, there are a few options for it:
== Move to user/ ==
There is no reason for it to be in system/; it is not used by any system
dependency, nor is it essential to build or run the Adélie Core system.
Things would basically stay the same. We would continue to be at the
mercy of Alpine's patching, unless someone here really wants to take on
the worst package in packages.git. However, seeing as nobody should be
using it, I don't know that such a thing would be bad.
== Remove ==
Considering the brokenness[1][2][3] of BusyBox, we could remove it from
the repositories entirely. We may be able to compile a static coreutils
for recovery.
== Replace with Toybox ==
Since BusyBox is only packaged for static tools for recovery, we could
replace it with Toybox. While it is missing some functionality, it is
much closer to the standards and what a reasonable user would expect
from a recovery environment.
I'd like to resolve this before BETA2 if possible. Let's discuss!
Best,
--arw
[1]: https://www.mail-archive.com/busybox@busybox.net/msg25157.html
[2]: https://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/9279
[3]: https://da.gd/buggybox
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Open-source programmer (C, C++, Python)
https://code.foxkit.us/u/awilfox/
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org